I agree with the idea that the “five-paragraph essay” is a problematic way of teaching essay writing.  Personally, when I learned how to write essays this way, I didn’t understand it.  Every time I was forced to practice writing these, it felt forced, and the ideas would not flow the way I wanted them to from paragraph to paragraph.  Instead, it was a constant A, B, C pattern of essay writing.  At the end of this, all I had learned to do was plug in statements and sloppily sew them together with information gained from reading on a test.

I can’t think of a better alternative to this essay, however.  It was brought up that the standardization was done to make teaching and grading easier for teachers with far too many students.  The issue wouldn’t lay in the essay itself, but rather the standardization that teachers are forced to follow by higher-ups.  If a teacher had the freedom of going about this essay in their own way, maybe it wouldn’t be as bad.  Instead, teachers themselves are looking at the lesson of the “five-paragraph essay” as a grade, much like the students are looking at completing the essay as a grade.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.